11 June 2014 3:56 PM

I might as well try one more time

Mr ‘P’ makes the following odd offer : ‘The fact is that Nazism in Europe ended in the spring of 1945 after going to war in 1939, and its horrors brought to an end with it. I am perfectly prepared to agree to all Mr Hitchens says if he can present compelling evidence that his timescale for allied intervention would not have delayed the end of the war beyond the spring of 1945.’

This sort of thing tempts me to follow the advice of the contributor who advised me to give up on the topic, as so many people simply aren’t capable of grasping my simple proposition.

Of course the whole war cult is a semi-religious one, and some people simply won’t ever be able to let go of their beliefs about it, which guide them in much, if not all, of their view of the world. These are the sort of people who think that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein Slobodan Milosevic and the others are all new Hitlers. For them there is nothing I can say. Many of us long to have things divided into simple good and simple evil, and dislike it when we’re told it’s not so. I understand the urge. I'm opften wrongly accused of suffering from it. But it’s mistaken.

But perhaps there are others, mere witnesses to these clashes, who might pick up something.

Mr P seems to think that the duration of the war is some sort of fixed quantity, and that if it started in 1939, it was bound to end in 1945 . From this he seems to deduce that, if it started in, say, 1941, it was bound to have lasted until 1947.

I think this is absurd. For a start, as I have said here before, the huge French Army and the large French economy were eliminated from the anti-German side of the war almost totally in 1940, and only partially returned towards the end. The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940, was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.

Half my point here is that this was not the only possible outcome, though it was a reasonable outcome of the peculiar strategy adopted by Britain and France in April 1939, which allowed Germany to fight them on one front and so defeat them quite easily, without even needing a pretext to start a war, as they’d already declared it.

As it happened, Britain and France were very nearly eliminated from the First World War in the autumn of 1914 but, largely because Germany was fighting a war on two fronts, and spread its army too thin, they were not. It was a close-run thing, though, as such events always are. Anglo-French policy in 1914 was pretty foolish, but it was nothing like as daft as their policy in 1939.

Can I just get Mr ’P’ (or anyone else) to think a bit here?

The hinge of decision is not May 1940. It is April 1939.Without April 1939, and the empty, dishonest guarantee to Poland, which only Poland believed, there would have been no September 1939 invasion of Poland, no May 1940 invasion of the Low Countries and France, as we know it.

Without the Polish guarantee, a whole series of events Mr ‘P’ takes for granted would almost certainly not have happened.

My guess is that Poland would have renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany, that Poland would have ceded Danzig to Germany, and permitted the construction of German roads and rail lines across the corridor. No agreement on the partition of Poland would have been attempted or reached between Germany and the USSR, hence no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Hitler was an opportunist. We don’t know what he would have done next. But without the promise of a neutral, even friendly USSR, and with a heavily-armed France sat on his Western frontier, he would have had much less freedom of action.

Mr ‘P’ also needs to understand that , while the government of Germany was a National Socialist (‘Nazi’) dictatorship, Hitler was following classical liberal German foreign policy dating back to 1915, namely Friedrich Naumann’s policy of ‘Mitteleuropa’ , or German domination of central and eastern Europe, not necessarily through direct political control. The allies were not fighting ‘The Nazis’. They were fighting Germany, which might well have followed equally aggressive policies under a different government. The allies were not fighting ‘Nazism’. They had tolerated it and dealt with it willingly for six years.

He must also grasp the fact, repeatedly pointed out by me, that a) Hitler did not adopt the policy of mass extermination of Jews until well after the war had begun c) that it was only his eastern conquests, and his invasion of the Low Countries, followed by his defeat of Britain and France in May 1940, which placed most of Europe’s Jews in his grasp, and c) that the allies never lifted a finger to prevent that extermination, long after they had reliable information that it was going on. Would he perhaps just say that he has taken this fact in? So few of my opponents on this matter ever do. It would save so much trouble, and it is a demonstrable and undisputed fact.

So, for the ninetieth time, to characterise World War Two as a war to stop the Holocaust is simply incorrect. Our side didn’t fight it for that purpose.

As for the victory of the allies ending the Holocaust, that is undoubtedly the case, and axiomatic. But it is also possible that the rate and speed of the mass murder may have been accelerated by Hitler’s knowledge of approaching defeat. I don’t think we can know, not least because there is so little surviving documentation and most of those involved who were caught lied about what they were up to. Either way, it can’t really be made an issue in this discussion.

By the way, the horrors of World War two did not, alas, end with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. The ghastly ethnic cleansing of the Potsdam agreement, many times described here, brought misery and death to multitudes of innocent women and children. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe was bloody and cruel on a colossal scale.

I can guarantee nothing about a past which never happened. But I can say that it seems to me to be quite possible that, by remaining in a state of strong and increasingly armed neutrality, Britain and France might well have achieved a better result than the one they did achieve – namely, the end of both of them as major powers, the alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the utter destruction of Poland and its imprisonment under foreign rule for the next 50 years, the invasion, rape and occupation of the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway and France, and the near-defeat of the USSR by surprise attack in 1941. The USA didn’t suffer by staying out, and is not reviled for it. Nor, except by a very few who know the details, is Russia reviled for her cynical behaviour between 1939 and 1941.

The simplest way of making the point remains A.J.P. Taylor’s bitter question. ‘In 1940, would you rather have been a ‘betrayed’ Czech, or a ‘saved’ Pole?’ The contrast between the rhetoric and the facts of life is the thing to bear in mind. Talk of honour as much as you like but if your ‘honour’ means someone else’s home being burned to the ground, while he and his family are marched off to slavery or death, it doesn’t seem to me to be worth all that much.

An honest self-interested policy of defending one’s own national interests seems to me to be preferable to this sort of exalted, pseudo-noble palaver, in which ‘doing the right thing’ and feeling good about yourself happens to involve death and misery for lots of other people, not to mention the diminution of your own national independence for all future time.

The guarantee to Poland and our subsequent entry into the war was foolhardy and reckless. If Hitler had listened to his generals and pursued us at Dunkirk we would have lost most of our men and equipment (such as it was) and been forced into a humiliating truce or total surrender, this was the first of Churchill’s many bad decisions in coming to the aid of the French. If the Germans had fought a more tactical battle and concentrated on our airfields in The Battle of Britain, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. If Japan hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbour there is no guarantee that the USA would have entered the war and we paid a very high price for that. It is possible to walk through a minefield and emerge unscathed but, it is not a practice to be recommended.

Perhaps if you relied less on emotion and concentrated on the logical, you might earn more respect and become less boring, pathetic and tedious.

Richard (11th @ 11.32pm) : Don't hold your breath, chum. Some topics are verboten here (I know this from having had a number of what I thought were fair comments blocked by the Moderator), and Common Purpose is pretty obviously one of them.

"Patrick Buchanan wrote an interesting book about all this some years ago - 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War'"

Buchanan's thesis is a nonsense bereft of a moral dimension. The Nazi regime was a master-race promulgating and theologising survival of the fittest prospectus by dint of might being right. Might equivalent to worthiness - specifically German might and German worthiness. In a straight lifting from the evolutionary world of blindly pitiless natural selection the Nazis grafted the right of the mighty to preferential survival on the whole of the human condition. Such natural conscience as we have been gifted by the very same evolution was to be expunged from the Nazified human condition, and eugenics was one way they were keen to try to this end.

To suggest that the issues facing the allied governments in World War II, and long before its start come to that, were those of simply opposing 'people like us' who liked to stomp about and wave flags - the Germans were after all idiosyncratically militaristic, but so what? - is to advertise a mountainous ignorance of the Nazi regime and its vision of a thousand-year dark age. Churchill, whom Buchanan seeks to rubbish with every page, saw that dark future and determined it would never come to pass. Yes Britain lost its empire (and America gained one) and many lives were lost. But the Nazi dark age never came, and to the extent that it didn't we have Churchill among many others to thank. The Second World War, contrary to Buchanan's thesis, was a very necessary war.

Hi Peter I think you have made a couple of mistakes with your analysis of WW2 and the belief that our Polish guarantee enflamed the situation..... Firstly I think Hitler was always going to try and expand an empire to the East. This did not come about by opportunity. Hitler was aggressively rearming in the long-term since he came to power in 1933 so that land could be taken by force. He was planning for this long before he invaded Poland and subsequently realised he needed a subservient Poland as a satelite state to achieve his empire in slavic lands. Jozef Beck was vehemently against Poland becoming a puppet of Germany. I agree that our guarantee made Poland bolder to resist Nazi aggression and that possibly Poland could have reached an agreement over Danzig without our meddling. However this is not the main reason why war broke out bewteen the Poles and Germans. Hitler wanted Poland to join the anti-comintern pact and be an ally against the Soviet Union (he needed Polish territory from which to invade the Soviet Union). This was rejected by the Colonels in Warsaw because it would effectively have ended Polish independence. War between Poland and Germany was inevitable regardless of our guarantee. Poland's military were confident they could resist the Wehrmacht and therefore believed they should fight and not have their nation's foreign policy dictated to them.

Mr Hitchens begins one of his paragraphs with the words, "My guess is..." That sums up the entire debate. All counter-factual history is guesswork.
I would only add one fact, regarding the Holocaust. Mr Hitchens is right in saying that "Hitler did not adopt the policy of mass extermination of Jews until well after the war had begun", but he clearly had it in mind before then. In a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 - i.e. before the April guarantee to Poland - Hitler publicly declared, "...[I]f the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" You can see and hear him saying it on YouTube if you wish. Moreover, the Action T4 programme of state-licensed killing of the mentally ill and others judged genetically unfit was launched in October 1939 and had accounted for over 70,000 deaths by August 1941.

I sympathise with you - you have assembled a very convincing argument for why Britain was foolish to declare war on Germany when she did, yet a lot of people seem to (a) not have read your previous work on the subject and/or (b) still be under the delusion that WWII was great, Britain was victorious and as a result we shall remain so for all eternity - as proven by our winning the football World Cup in 1966, against - oh yes - Germany, with of course the help of the Russians - in this case a Russian linesman.

If only time had stopped when we lifted the World Cup in 1966. Unfortunately I think for some people it appears to have done so.

I could dispute the earlier contributor's assertion that the V2 rocket was "an unbeatable weapon" but I prefer instead to get a little more up to date, and ask you to move away from WWII and Michael Gove (as interesting as those two subjects are) and perhaps, if you could, focus instead on what is currently happening in Iraq - and comment on the questions that everyone should be asking about our role in the catastrophic events there and why no western politicians who were involved in the decision to invade Iraq have yet been brought to account for everything that has happened there since and what is likely to happen there in future bearing in mind the current situation.

Maybe you, Max Keiser, George Galloway and Nigel Farrage could collaborate on making a film and writing a book about the British Government, the Economy, the War on Terror and other things to inform the British public about the truth in time for the next Election. I think they have a right to know and its only going to be through people like you that the truth is likely to get out there.

"I might as well try one more time" ? What happened to "try once more". When I went to Canada and the USA some years ago I was told that 'once or twice' and 'fortnight' were not understood and some years ago when I used to hear 'the Archers' I heard Jill Archer -- the matriarch -- using 'one more time' so I thought the BBC must be enforcing this ugly phrase into the vocabulary.

Perhaps now is a good time for a bystander to chime in with some encouragement.
I appreciate your tenacity on this subject as each post (which must seem like a painstaking restatement to you) adds some detail of which I was previously unaware: I had not heard of the historian AJP Taylor until just now.
Other details, like the actions Russia during 1939-1941, I knew something about but am forced to rethink. You make a good case for foreign policy based on self interest, but isn't that what Russia was doing in this period? I guess the answer lies in a distinction between Stalin's cynical opportunism and Russia's long term self interest.

Only an occasional visitor here, but Mr Johnson's contribution (11 June at 04:52PM) is the single most embarrassingly child-like post I have ever seen on any forum anywhere. Please tell me you are a school boy.

I will select 'Geraint' as being the most blatant of those commenting here who have deliberately misunderstood what I say, so as to avoid actually thinking about it. 'Geraint' writes, 'Peter Hitchens declares that we were not in contact with the enemy until 44. That would be a surprise to those in North Africa/Crete/Malta and Italy. That's not even including against the Japanese at Malaya and Burma. Indeed it is the surrender at Singapore that did more to lose our Empire than the Nazis.

But I didn't write that we were 'not in contact with the enemy until 44'. Such a statement is obviously absurd. I wrote 'The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940, was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.' The difference between the two is enormous. Yet 'Geraint' is quite happy to put at least half his name to this total untruth.

How can one strive against this sort of thing? How can one deal with the people who think I say that a German-Polish deal in 1939 would have resulted in permanent peace (I don't, and have often speculated on how and where else Hitler might have pursued his eastward drive if he had been at peace with Poland). How can I deal with those who seem to think that May 1940 would have happened anyway even if Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September 1939. How can I deal with those who can't see that France, undefeated and powerfully defended, would have remained a military problem for Germany, which it was not once it had been defeated and occupied?

How can I deal with those who repeatedly ask to me stipulate the exact date and nature of Britain's entry into the war, if not in September 1939, when the question is self-evidently absurd and I have just explained why it is self-evidently absurd?

How can I deal with those who seem to think that countries go to war because they disapprove of other people's governments - in which case how could we ever have had the USSR as an ally?

How can I deal with those who refuse to acquaint themselves with the actual history of Hitler's treatment of the Jews first of Germany and then of the rest of Europe, and the history of the democracies' failure to do anything about it? And who still imagine that we went to war in 1939 as an anti-racist crusade? Or indeed that the rescue of Europe's Jews ever formed part of our warlike purpose?

How can I deal with those who don't grasp that Britain was actually bankrupted by war by 1940, and never recovered? That she wasn't, and could not afford to be, a major European military power?

How can I deal with those who cannot see that taking advantage of the tension between Germany and Russia, complicated by armed Anglo-French neutrality, would have been a classic balance-of-power policy? Whereas our declaration of war in 1939 *destroyed* that balance?

The answer is that I can't. And I can't because the myth of the 'Finest Hour' is as potent in the modern British mind, especially among people of a certain age (mine, mainly), as the great religious stories were in the minds of their forebears. It is a tale of lone heroism, of good triumphing over evil against the odds, of heroic brotherhood with selfless allies . Alas, it is not true. And it leads us, every few years, into folly after folly after folly, in which innocent people die screaming for no good purpose. That's why I keep on and on about it.

Oh, this topic again. It reminds me of why I did engineering at University; History has always struck me as suitable to people with time on their hands: interesting, possibly, but not much more useful to humanity than Sociology. People either don't learn from it or when they try to it's inapplicable because the world changes so.

Speaking of Nazis, as we were, here in Transylvania I work with Nazi sympathisers. My (ethnic Hungarian) boss is one and openly tells me that he'd happily re-open Auchwitz and put the people he doesn't like back in it. He looks at a long chain of historical events (seen purely from his perspective, of course) culminating in his people losing control of land they considered to be theirs. Two points here, I think: 1) history-philes are generally biased and irresponsible and feel in no way compelled to be otherwise; 2) lets try to move on.

Thanks go to Mr Hitchens for so quickly bring to our attention the current presence of far-right groups in this conflict in Ukraine. Let's try to deal with the situation as it is now.

I see a lot of your point, Mr. Hitchens, but I'll also note that Hitler's moves against the Jews in Germany and Austria began the year before the European war broke out. Further, I doubt Hitler would have been satisfied with a greater German Mitteleuropa, for his _Mein Kampf_ makes it clear he planned to invade Russia to get Lebensraum.

Also, British and German forces confronted each other in northern Africa between 1940 and 1944. The fall of the Suez Canal to German arms would've been as big a blow to Britain as its army being trapped in, rather than evacuated from, Dunkirk.

And let's not forget Asia. Japan definitely wanted Europe's colonies, and might have gotten them a lot quicker had China made a separate peace with Japan rather than fight such battles as Tai'erzhuang and Kunlunguan.

World War II was several wars running together. I'm not sure armed neutrality rather than intervention on behalf of Poland would've made that much a difference to someone like Hitler.

The crux of the matter is that Hitler was hell bent on war with the Soviet Union right from day one. Hitler's proclamations in Mein Kampf speak to the point. The policy of Lebensraum and the Generalplan Ost meant that Poland was merely the stepping stone to bigger ambitions further eastward.

That had one major implication - Hitler's Germany in possession of a vast land empire in the east or Stalin's Red Army marching westward across central and western Europe. Anyone seriously think the hammer & sickle would've halted at Calais?

In any event, the most sensible policy on the part of Britain and France when faced with this predicament was surely a defensive strategy, which sought to shore up as many nearby friends and allies to keep either of the two monsters in their place when one gained the upper hand.

With the greatest respect (as I am a big fan) would it be possible for you to leave these irrelevant debates on WW2 and focus on something that matters in the hear and now. One example would be the fact that Common Purpose (a bogus political charity) has infiltrated every facet of our public sector and are currently in charge of Leveson enquiry.

"Mr ‘P’ also needs to understand that , while the government of Germany was a National Socialist (‘Nazi’) dictatorship, Hitler was following classical liberal German foreign policy dating back to 1915, namely Friedrich Naumann’s policy of ‘Mitteleuropa’ , or German domination of central and eastern Europe, not necessarily through direct political control."

Maybe so, but were we not also pursuing our historic foreign policy charge of ensuring that no single continental power enjoys hegemony over the whole of Europe, or even a substantial part of it. I needn't advise Mr Hitchens of this conventional wisdom for he will know it perfectly well already. I cite it here only in response to Mr Hitchens reminding me of its German corollary. Thus we might have been diabolically ill-advised in 1939 with no immediate British interest apparent, but we were nevertheless exercising our historic charge, even duty. If the Nazis were operating historically, so to speak, why not we?

I would also like to comment on this, quoting Mr Hitchens in full....

"He must also grasp the fact, repeatedly pointed out by me, that a) Hitler did not adopt the policy of mass extermination of Jews until well after the war had begun c) that it was only his eastern conquests, and his invasion of the Low Countries, followed by his defeat of Britain and France in May 1940, which placed most of Europe’s Jews in his grasp, and c) that the allies never lifted a finger to prevent that extermination, long after they had reliable information that it was going on. Would he perhaps just say that he has taken this fact in? "

The extermination of the Jews began immediately the panzer divisions had pushed the front into the Polish hinterland. The police battalions at once began 'mopping up' Jewish settlements in the wake of the Wehrmacht advance. By 'mopping up' I mean summary en-masse murder. The murder continued unabated after the invasion of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that at least a million people surplus to Nazi requirements were murdered wholesale in the two years since the invasion of Poland. The *mass* extermination in the purpose-built death camps followed on from the ad hoc murders in Poland and Russia during the period 1942 - 1944.

I agree with Mr Hitchens that the Allies to their eternal shame did nothing specifically to end the state-organised slaughter - other than to pursue the war to a victorious close at the soonest. We are left with the fact that Allied victory in the Second World War ended the Nazi murder. It ended in the spring of 1945. Any revisionism contemplated by anyone promulgating novel notions of who said what to whom must present concrete evidence that not a single extra Nazi murder would have resulted.

Again I ask Mr Hitchens: given his later timeline (when exactly we are not told), would that later timeline have ended the war in Allied victory in the spring of 1945 at the latest? This is not a hard question. A yes or a no will suffice. If the answer is 'yes' then some credible argument (at least) needs to be presented as to how a much stronger Germany (per Plan Z as regards the Kriegsmarine) would have been defeated - say two years later and after a probable German defeat of Russia.

Mr Hitchins has given a framework for an alternative WW2 if as he so rightly points out - the British Government had not tried to write a cheque it had no capacity to cash.
Even if for some undisclosed reason, Hitler had decided to attack France , it can be assumed that France would fall as rapidly as it did in 1940 - the difference being that when the Germans arrived at the channel - parked on the otherside would be a fully equipped and rapidly retraining British army.
Hitler had no reason to attack a neutral France and an irrelevant Britain as long as we and our possessions were left alone.
Hitler had always looked East and his ideological loathing of Stalin-ism is very well documented.
One must assume that the invasion of the Soviet Union would have gone ahead.
Success ? very hard to tell, the evidence suggests not. Supply lines far too stretched, Winter , Rasputsia etc.. When would Soviet Russia have conquered Germany ? not possible to calculate, The race for atomic weapons would be the deciding factor.
Of course it is still highly likely that the Japanese would still have attacked Pearl Harbor and British , Dutch and French interests in the Far East since this is what they were being effectively forced to do by American policy - again British military incompetence would not have been any different and the result the same.
The difference would be a Royal Navy that would not be diluted by fighting Germany and so would be able to concentrate on taking on the Japanese navy.
This is all very fascinating but Mr Hitchins detractors are missing his fundamental point - which is that this is all supposition - but we should learn from past error and not write cheques we can not cash - Iraq , Afghanistan and nearly Syria - are we learning ?

I was born after the end of the second world war and have been very interested in history. The argument that Mr Hitchens makes is, from an historical viewpoint, interesting and, in my view, persuasive or at the very least arguable. A couple of points. First, in the ITV series on Bletchley Park, it was said that cracking the Enigma codes probably shortened the war by two years and so, on those grounds, the war may have gone on until 1947. As for the First World War, the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) was thrown back and it is probably to the credit of General Smith-Dorien that a rout did not ensue.
Lastly, the sentence that "we should not have got involved (in the second World War) when we did" should be THE resounding message of World War 2 and any future foreign campaign in my view

Mr Hitchens I wrote in support of your ‘simple proposition’ some time ago, I was bombarded with ridicule from ‘the usual suspects’ and decided not to bother any more. You are obviously built of sterner stuff and I have to admire your tenacity in the face of such an onslaught.

I have carefully read your post and nowhere do you say, “If we had not followed this course of action, then this would/would not have happened”. How could you say that? It is beyond our knowing but we can study the possibilities and probabilities and see what the odds favoured after all, bookmakers do this all the time and, so I am told, do those who plan for future wars or the possibility of future wars. Our guarantee to Poland was a gross act of folly which severely endangered the future of this country and that of France.

To paraphrase Lord Melbourne, “I wish I was as cocksure of anything as your opponents (on this issue at least) are about everything”.

What does Peter Hitchens make of the comments made by 'Jared' (11 June @ 12am), on a previous thread ('What I think about World War Two'), about the 'White Book Documents,' which I believe are available online to anyone who Googles this phrase?

"My guess is that Poland would have renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany, that Poland would have ceded Danzig to Germany, and permitted the construction of German roads and rail lines across the corridor. No agreement on the partition of Poland would have been attempted or reached between Germany and the USSR, hence no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Hitler was an opportunist. We don’t know what he would have done next. But without the promise of a neutral, even friendly USSR, and with a heavily-armed France sat on his Western frontier, he would have had much less freedom of action."

How naive to assume that Hitler would have made no further territorial demands on Poland despite the many ethnic Germans in its western provinces - a 180 degree change in policy from the massacre of the intelligentsia that took place from 1 September 1940 onwards (Operation Tannenberg). And why wouldn't Hitler take the opportunity for a war of revenge against France in 1940 say, given that his eastern border was protected from the USSR by the vassal buffer state of Poland? After all, in your previous post, France was " ill-equipped for such a struggle" instead of "heavily-armed".
As for the neutrality or otherwise of the Soviet Union and Stalin's appreciation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin said to Stafford-Cripps in July 1940 "I am not so naive as to believe the German assurances that they have no desire for hegemony, but what I am convinced of is the physical impossibility of such hegemony, since Germany lacks the necessary seapower."

To guess and to hope that increasingly militarized but neutral France and Britain would have been effective restraints on Germany... cannot really be taken that seriously.

France had already demonstrated its commitment to a "fortress strategy" and it was very obvious that there was no real desire among the western allies to close with the Germans. The German high command were well informed... and fully acquainted with these realities.

Germany would have stormed into the east, leaving token but competent forces in the west.. Russia was even less prepared in 1939/40... following the purges; they were still nervous about the Japanese in the east; the T34 was not in mass production. It would have been a wipe-out.

Germany would have been in total control of eastern Europe and Russia by the end of 1942... at the latest.

Brief period of consolidation... and the long nursed hatred and resentment of France would have seen the entire might of the Third Reich descend on the west.

If they derived huge benefit from the acquisition of Czech technology and manufacturing, I wonder what all those resources in the Ukraine, the USSR and Poland would have allowed them to do.

The war in the air would have played out very differently. No bloody nose in British skies... and the ME262 available in large numbers as the standard fighter... and with plenty of experienced pilots... all by the end of 1942.

And... as a "trivial" aside... our Polish allies were invaluable in their contribution to unravelling the mysteries of the mysteries of the enigma... as well as in helping us combat the V weapons.

I'm not sure whether there are any "up-sides" to this scenario... but it's a lot more believable than a quiescent and peaceful Hitler satisfied with Danzig and a corridor.

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